This paper proposes a novel practical path planning framework for autonomous parking in cluttered environments with narrow passages. The proposed global path planning method is based on an improved Fast Marching algorithm to generate a path while considering the moving forward and backward maneuver. In addition, the Support Vector Machine is utilized to provide the maximum clearance from obstacles considering the vehicle dynamics to provide a safe and feasible path. The algorithm considers the most critical points in the map and the complexity of the algorithm is not affected by the shape of the obstacles. We also propose an autonomous parking scheme for different parking situation. The method is implemented on autonomous vehicle platform and validated in the real environment with narrow passages.

This paper introduces a simple algorithm for pedestrian detection on low resolution images. The main objective is to create a successful means for real-time pedestrian detection. While the framework of the system consists of edge orientations combined with the local binary patterns (LBP) feature extractor, a novel way of selecting the threshold is introduced. Using the mean-variance of the background examples this threshold improves significantly the detection rate as well as the processing time. Furthermore, it makes the system robust to uniformly cluttered backgrounds, noise and light variations. The test data is the INRIA pedestrian dataset and for the classification, a support vector machine with a radial basis function (RBF) kernel is used. The system performs at state-of-the-art detection rates while being intuitive as well as very fast which leaves sufficient processing time for further operations such as tracking and danger estimation.

The abundance of information published on the Internet makes filtering of hazardous Web pages a difficult yet important task. Supervised learning methods such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs) can be used to identify hazardous Web content. However, scalability is a big challenge, especially if we have to train multiple classifiers, since different policies exist on what kind of information is hazardous. We therefore propose two different strategies to train multiple SVMs for personalized Web content filters. The first strategy identifies common data clusters and then performs optimization on these clusters in order to obtain good initial solutions for individual problems. This initialization shortens the path to the optimal solutions and reduces the training time on individual training sets. The second approach is to train all SVMs simultaneously. We introduce an SMO-based kernel-biased heuristic that balances the reduction rate of individual objective functions and the computational cost of kernel matrix. The heuristic primarily relies on the optimality conditions of all optimization problems and secondly on the pre-calculated part of the whole kernel matrix. This strategy increases the amount of information sharing among learning tasks, thus reduces the number of kernel calculation and training time. In our experiments on inconsistently labeled training examples, both strategies were able to predict hazardous Web pages accurately (> 91%) with a training time of only 26% and 18% compared to that of the normal sequential training.

Localization in wireless sensor networks is the problem of estimating the geographical locations of wireless sensor nodes. We propose a framework to utilizing multiple data sources for localization scheme based on support vector machines. The framework can be used with both classification and regression formulation of support vector machines. The proposed method uses only connectivity information. Multiple hop count data sources can be generated by adjusting the transmission power of sensor nodes to change the communication ranges. The optimal choice of communication ranges can be determined by evaluating mutual information. We consider two methods for integrating multiple data sources together; unif method and align method. The improved localization accuracy of the proposed framework is verified by simulation study.

In this paper, a novel feature named bidirectional local template patterns (B-LTP) is proposed for use in pedestrian detection in still images. B-LTP is a combination and modification of two features, histogram of templates (HOT) and center-symmetric local binary patterns (CS-LBP). For each pixel, B-LTP defines four templates, each of which contains the pixel itself and two neighboring center-symmetric pixels. For each template, it then calculates information from the relationships among these three pixels and from the two directional transitions across these pixels. Moreover, because the feature length of B-LTP is small, it consumes less memory and computational power. Experimental results on an INRIA dataset show that the speed and detection rate of our proposed B-LTP feature outperform those of other features such as histogram of orientated gradient (HOG), HOT, and covariance matrix (COV).

This paper presents link analysis based on rhetorical relations with the aim of performing extractive summarization for multiple documents. We first extracted sentences with salient terms from individual document using statistical model. We then ranked the extracted sentences by measuring their relative importance according to their connectivity among the sentences in the document set using PageRank based on the rhetorical relations. The rhetorical relations were examined beforehand to determine which relations are crucial to this task, and the relations among sentences from documents were automatically identified by SVMs. We used the relations to emphasize important sentences during sentence ranking by PageRank and eliminate redundancy from the summary candidates. Our framework omits fully annotated sentences by humans and the evaluation results show that the combination of PageRank along with rhetorical relations does help to improve the quality of extractive summarization.

Training one-class support vector machines (one-class SVMs) involves solving a quadratic programming (QP) problem. By increasing the number of training samples, solving this QP problem becomes intractable. In this paper, we describe a modified Pegasos algorithm for fast training of one-class SVMs. We show that this algorithm is much faster than the standard one-class SVM without loss of performance in the case of linear kernel.

This paper presents a new technique to smooth speech feature vectors for text-independent speaker verification using an adaptive band-pass IIR filer. The filter is designed by considering the probability density of modulation-frequency components of an M-dimensional feature vector. Each dimension of the feature vector is processed and filtered separately. Initial filter parameters, low-cut-off and high-cut-off frequencies, are first determined by the global mean of the probability densities computed from all feature vectors of a given speech utterance. Then, the cut-off frequencies are adapted over time, i.e. every frame vector, in both low-frequency and high-frequency bands based also on the global mean and the standard deviation of feature vectors. The filtered feature vectors are used in a SVM-GMM Supervector speaker verification system. The NIST Speaker Recognition Evaluation 2006 (SRE06) core-test is used in evaluation. Experimental results show that the proposed technique clearly outperforms a baseline system using a conventional RelAtive SpecTrA (RASTA) filter.

Many people have faced mortal risks due to sudden disasters such as earthquakes, fires, and terrorisms, etc. In disasters where most people become panic, it is important to grasp disaster positions immediately and to find out some appropriate evacuation routes. We previously proposed the specific evacuation support system named as Emergency Rescue Evacuation Support System (ERESS). ERESS is based on Mobile Ad-hoc network (MANET) and aims to reduce the number of victims in panic-type disasters. This system consists of mobile terminals with advanced disaster recognition algorithm and various sensors such as acceleration, angular velocity and earth magnetism. However, the former ERESS did not have the clear criteria to detect the disaster outbreak. In this paper, we propose a new disaster recognition algorithm by Support Vector Machine (SVM) which is a kind of machine learning. In this method, an ERESS mobile terminal learns the behaviors of its holder by SVM. The SVM acquires the decision boundary based on the sensing data of the terminal holder, and it is judged whether to be the emergency. We show the validity of the proposed method by panic-type experiments.

We propose a practical local and global path-planning algorithm for an autonomous vehicle or a car-like robot in an unknown semi-structured (or unstructured) environment, where obstacles are detected online by the vehicle's sensors. The algorithm utilizes a probabilistic method based on particle filters to estimate the dynamic obstacles' locations, a support vector machine to provide the critical points and Bezier curves to smooth the generated path. The generated path safely travels through various static and moving obstacles and satisfies the vehicle's movement constraints. The algorithm is implemented and verified on simulation software. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in complicated scenarios that posit the existence of multi moving objects.

We have previously proposed an indoor monitoring and security system with an array sensor. The array sensor has some advantages, such as low privacy concern, easy installation with low cost, and wide detection range. Our study is different from the previously proposed classification method for array sensor, which uses a threshold to classify only two states for intrusion detection: nothing and something happening. This paper describes a novel state classification method based on array signal processing with a machine learning algorithm. The proposed method uses eigenvector and eigenvalue spanning the signal subspace as features, obtained from the array sensor, and assisted by multiclass support vector machines (SVMs) to classify various states of a human being or an object. The experimental results show that our proposed method can provide high classification accuracy and robustness, which is very useful for monitoring and surveillance applications.

In this letter, we adopt a new factor analysis of neighborhood-preserving embedding (NPE) for speaker verification. NPE aims at preserving the local neighborhood structure on the data and defines a low-dimensional speaker space called neighborhood-preserving embedding space. We compare the proposed method with the state-of-the-art total variability approach on the telephone-telephone core condition of the NIST 2008 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE) dataset. The experimental results indicate that the proposed NPE method outperforms the total variability approach, providing up to 24% relative improvement.

In recent years, local pattern based features have attracted increasing interest in object detection and recognition systems. Local Binary Pattern (LBP) feature is widely used in texture classification and face detection. But the original definition of LBP is not suitable for human detection. In this paper, we propose a novel feature named gradient local binary patterns (GLBP) for human detection. In this feature, original 256 local binary patterns are reduced to 56 patterns. These 56 patterns named uniform patterns are used for generating a 56-bin histogram. And gradient value of each pixel is set as the weight which is always same in LBP based features in histogram calculation to computing the values in 56 bins for histogram. Experiments are performed on INRIA dataset, which shows the proposal GLBP feature is discriminative than histogram of orientated gradient (HOG), Semantic Local Binary Patterns (S-LBP) and histogram of template (HOT). In our experiments, the window size is fixed. That means the performance can be improved by boosting methods. And the computation of GLBP feature is parallel, which make it easy for hardware acceleration. These factors make GLBP feature possible for real-time pedestrian detection.

With the consideration of real-time stream processing technology, it's important to develop high availability mechanism to guarantee stream-based application not interfered by faults caused by potential anomalies. In this paper, we present a novel online prediction technique for predicting some anomalies which may occur in the near future. Concretely, we first present a value prediction which combines the Hidden Markov Model and the Mixture of Expert Model to predict the values of feature metrics in the near future. Then we employ the Support Vector Machine to do anomaly identification, which is a procedure to identify the kind of anomaly that we are about to alarm. The purpose of our approach is to achieve a tradeoff between fault penalty and resource cost. The experiment results show that our approach is of high accuracy for common anomaly prediction and low runtime overhead.

An active learning method, called Two-stage Active learning algorithm (TAL), is developed for software defect prediction. Combining the clustering and support vector machine techniques, this method improves the performance of the predictor with less labeling effort. Experiments validate its effectiveness.

It is important to optimize aggregation schemes for heterogeneous wireless networks for maximizing communication throughput utilizing any available radio access networks. In the heterogeneous networks, differences of the quality of service (QoS), such as throughput, delay and packet loss rate, of the networks makes difficult to maximize the aggregation throughput. In this paper, we firstly analyze influences of such differences in QoS to the aggregation throughput, and show that it is possible to improve the throughput by adjusting the parameters of an aggregation system. Since manual parameter optimization is difficult and takes much time, we propose an autonomous parameter tuning scheme using a machine learning algorithm for the heterogeneous wireless network aggregation. We implement the proposed scheme on a heterogeneous cognitive radio network system. The results on our experimental network with network emulators show that the proposed scheme can improve the aggregation throughput better than the conventional schemes. We also evaluate the performance using public wireless network services, such as HSDPA, WiMAX and W-CDMA, and verify that the proposed scheme can improve the aggregation throughput by iterating the learning cycle even for the public wireless networks. Our experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves twice better aggregation throughput than the conventional schemes.

Measuring the relational similarity between word pairs is important in numerous natural language processing tasks such as solving word analogy questions, classifying noun-modifier relations and disambiguating word senses. We propose a supervised classification method to measure the similarity between semantic relations that exist between words in two word pairs. First, each pair of words is represented by a vector of automatically extracted lexical patterns. Then a binary Support Vector Machine is trained to recognize word pairs with similar semantic relations to a given word pair. To train and evaluate the proposed method, we use a benchmark dataset that contains 374 SAT multiple-choice word-analogy questions. To represent the relations that exist between two word pairs, we experiment with 11 different feature functions, including both symmetric and asymmetric feature functions. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms several previously proposed relational similarity measures on this benchmark dataset, achieving an SAT score of 46.9.

Since retina blood vessels (RBV) are a major factor in ophthalmological diagnosis, it is essential to detect RBV from a fundus image. In this letter, we proposed the detection method of RBV using a morphological analysis and support vector machine classification. The proposed RBV detection method consists of three strategies: pre-processing, features extraction and classification. In pre-processing, noises were reduced and RBV were enhanced by anisotropic diffusion filtering and illumination equalization. Features were extracted by using the image intensity and morphology of RBV. And a support vector machine (SVM) classification algorithm was used to detect RBV. The proposed RBV detection method was simulated and validated by using the DRIVE database. The averages of accuracy and TPR are 0.94 and 0.78, respectively. Moreover, by comparison, we confirmed that the proposed RBV detection method detected RBV better than the recent RBV detections methods.

In this letter, a new terrain type classifier is proposed for polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (Pol-SAR) images. This classifier uses the binary tree structure. The homogenous and inhomogeneous areas are first classified by the support vector machine (SVM) classifier based on the texture features extracted from the span image. Then the homogenous and inhomogeneous areas are, respectively, classified by the traditional Wishart classifier and the SVM classifier based on the texture features. Using a NASA/JPL AIRSAR image, the authors achieve the classification accuracy of up to 98%, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

One kind of functional noncoding RNAs, microRNAs (miRNAs), form a class of endogenous RNAs that can have important regulatory roles in animals and plants by targeting transcripts for cleavage or translation repression. Researches on both experimental and computational approaches have shown that miRNAs indeed involve in the human cancer development and progression. However, the miRNAs that contribute more information to the distinction between the normal and tumor samples (tissues) are still undetermined. Recently, the high-throughput microarray technology was used as a powerful technique to measure the expression level of miRNAs in cells. Analyzing this expression data can allow us to determine the functional roles of miRNAs in the living cells. In this paper, we present a computational method to (1) predicting the tumor tissues using high-throughput miRNA expression profiles; (2) finding the informative miRNAs that show strong distinction of expression level in tumor tissues. To this end, we perform a support vector machine (SVM) based method to deeply examine one recent miRNA expression dataset. The experimental results show that SVM-based method outperforms other supervised learning methods such as decision trees, Bayesian networks, and backpropagation neural networks. Furthermore, by using the miRNA-target information and Gene Ontology annotations, we showed that the informative miRNAs have strong evidences related to some types of human cancer including breast, lung, and colon cancer.